Advanced Drone Warfare - No More Invincibility Frames
We all only live once.
Image Credit
“…not to mention once you hassle the horde, it doesn’t matter how much furniture you stack at the door, yea.” -Aesop Rock, “Coffin Jump”
This was never a post I wanted to write or think about, but it is coming to pass. It may have started with the Chinese Spy Balloon, but things have been progressively getting crazier ever since. There have been massive, SUV-sized drones slowly patrolling the skies of New Jersey, and nobody seems to have any clear idea who they belong to, what their actual function is, or what measures should be taken to ameliorate this situation.
Some of this is already happening in Kherson, Ukraine:
Kherson’s civilians have been, since midsummer, the target of an experiment without precedent in modern European warfare: a concerted Russian campaign to empty a city by stalking its residents with attack drones.
The killer machines, sometimes by the swarm, hover above homes, buzz into buildings and chase people down streets in their cars, riding bicycles or simply on foot. The targets are not soldiers, or tanks, but civilian life…Since mid-July, Kherson and its neighbouring villages along the western side of the Dnipro river have suffered more than 9,500 attacks with small drones, killing at least 37 people and injuring hundreds more…
Scores of videos of drone attacks on civilians are posted on Russian military and pro-war Telegram channels…The Russian drones, many of which were once used primarily for photography and videography, are equipped with grenades and improvised explosives. Many carry even bigger explosives, including anti-tank mines and RPG warheads that slam into their targets, kamikaze style. They have ranges up to 15km, fly at low altitudes and zip around at speeds of more than 100km per hour, making them difficult to track and take down…The Russian drones can also carry incendiary bombs, which set fires to homes and fields.
Worst case scenario:
Let’s picture a near-future scenario: you’re puttering along on the 58th floor of a corporate office building (call it Firm W because you always secure the win), sitting at your cubicle engaging in an accounting trick you pretended you didn’t know about when taking your CPA ethics exam. You’re a very valuable asset to this company and are compensated handsomely; you’ve saved Firm W from contributing millions of dollars to the local tax base and should be getting a large bonus soon. It’s an overcast day with nothing particularly out of the ordinary going on.
Suddenly, you jerk up from your computer terminal as you notice a fast shape growing quickly from the distance; a 7 ton drone flying at low altitude slams into your building at Mach 2.5, simultaneously detonating a small, couple kiloton yield nuke. You, the headquarters you work in, and everything in a 10 block radius of your building is instantaneously vaporized.
In this Strossian scenario, who could you attribute the attack to? The device was instantly destroyed in the attack, and the drone was flying low and fast enough that satellite imagery only captured a couple frames of footage. Was it a competing company? A foreign nation-state? Well funded terrorists? Disgruntled customers you ripped off?
There is very little way to obtain any of this information. Nobody is safe anymore from such an attack. The only way to be secure is to closely safeguard your real-time location data, mind your physical security, and be very careful otherwise. Forget a tired old nuclear triad, it’s a wired new age.
We need the next generation’s Seaborgs, Einsteins, Ghandis, and Mandelas to be working day and night on how to stop this from happening and how to defend against it. It can be export controls, security agreements, trade agreements, defense systems, whatever. This needs to be worked out NOW.
It’s as if we’ve been in a hand-holding tutorial phase of our little world until now. Now, the difficulty is going to ratchet up. Folks, strap in; it’s going to get weirder. Please stay safe; I’ve seen a lot of cases of whistleblower syndrome occurring lately.
That all being said, if you get killed doing what you love, you’ll never live another day in your life.